Fry’s Electronics To Carry PC-BSD 1.4

“iXsystems announced today a distribution agreement with Fry’s Electronics whereby all Fry’s stores nationwide will carry PC-BSD Version 1.4, Da Vinci Edition. The agreement marks the first time that the PC-BSD operating system is made available for purchase at Fry’s Electronics. PC-BSD is a fully functional desktop operating system based on FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE. FreeBSD is one of the most used UNIX-like operating systems in the world. It is widely renowned as the most stable and secure server operating system.”

OpenBSD is a fine operating system, but with the best paranoia 🙂 This is of course nothing bad, but security is not an automatism. So it’s up to you in the end, an operating system can deliver a proper base only.

2. no film, if you do your homework first; the NetBSD developer used a developer version of FreeBSD current, with lots of debug stuff in it. Both of them came later to similar results. So no flame-bait, no flame-war and last not least no film. Sorry. If you still want to use your popcorn head over to LKML =)

Nope. I balanced one possibly controversial point against another so that a flame war would be unlikely. And I linked to the actual exchange between the two testers to provide a fair and accurate view.

And I think I did pretty well since no flame war ever even threatened to break out. I think you misinterpreted my humorous spin on the theme of experimental bias for trolling, which is probably understandable.

And *of course* the interaction between the testers was professional and amicable. The OS wars are like sporting events. The players display a *lot* more sportsmanship than the fans. 😉

Online distribution doesn’t work so well for the initial OS purchase or rebuilds. Granted, the number of people who can’t get access to a network connection is getting smaller but you still need physical media sales until you get that network connection.

The best theory I’ve heard regarding Dell not releasing exact figures for Ubuntu versus other OS sales is that it avoids some of the journalist sensationalism articles and skript kiddie debates that run rampant.

Consider the example of the OLPC project. It is purely about getting education supporting tools too places where digital media is actually far more viable than expensive and limited quantity printed media. The project released a number early on; they wanted to aim for 100$ USD price per unit. There’s been no end to ongoing invalid critisism of the project for not meeting that secondary goal. Like any other debate, there is always someone willing to nitt pick at points purely for the chance to complain.

So, back to the point. The theory goes that Dell’s financial figures regarding customer choices is just that; Dell’s inventory figures. To some degree, they avoid the negative publicity of being bashed all around the net for not meeting targets or whatever other spin can be put on figures for someone’s chance to be heard complaining.

I can understand Dell’s choice. I’m one of those that would be interested to see solid test results. I’d also like to see true Distro by Distro *nix enumeration figures and true Windows version by version (actually in use) figures but both of those figure sets are not going to apear accurately any time soon either.

Overall, I’m just glad to see choice being offered to the end user outside of the usual geekdom sources.

“trying to push pc-bsd into the mainstream is not a good idea. It simply is still not user friendly enough, and will end up giving bsd/linux a bad image if they do get people to buy it.”

Why not? Has this stopped commercial Linux distros such as Mandrake and SUSE in the past? If there is profit to be made, why not go for it? It can only help the BSDs in the process, and really, they could use a slight boost, with Linux eating away at their pie and Solaris with “Project Indiana” trying to grab some market share. The most that will happen is, I figure, a large number of people with walk in Fry’s, see PC-BSD, go “WTF’s that?” and move on.

As for Fry’s in general… well, I always hear good things about the place. Lots of good deals, and apparently they carry some good stuff. To bad they’ve got no stores around here in Ohio. From their site when trying to find a nearby store:

I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, and I certainly don’t want to get Matt mad at me. But how is this news? Last time I was at Fry’s they had FreeBSD, NetBSD, AND OpenBSD. I don’t recall any OSNews announcement when they started to be carried (though Fry’s has probably carried FreeBSD since before OSNews was a gleam in its daddy’s eye).

“I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, and I certainly don’t want to get Matt mad at me. But how is this news? Last time I was at Fry’s they had FreeBSD, NetBSD, AND OpenBSD. I don’t recall any OSNews announcement when they started to be carried (though Fry’s has probably carried FreeBSD since before OSNews was a gleam in its daddy’s eye).”

PC-BSD and (Free, Open, Net)BSD target different audiences.

Those who want to use FreeBSD (insert NetBSD or OpenBSD, too) usually are able to order it from an online store or simply download it, and then they build their system after their individual requirements. In most cases, they won’t be customers at Fry’s.

Those who are new to a BSD OS will want to have everything they expect from an OS distribution as they know it from mainstream Linux distributions. So PC-BSD comes with KDE and lots of stuff that is targetted at the average home user. Look into the PBI store and see what’s available there. This is the target group that will visit Fry’s to see what’s on the shelves.

As a sidenote, I think it’s a good idea that a home user oriented BSD is available “the old fashioned way” for sale in a shop. Maybe the shiny package will be good for marketing, too. 🙂

solaris is mainly used for backend servers like databases and java appservers, linux is used a lot on embedded stuff, darwin in macosx desktops – none of which are webservers that netcraft would pick up.

freebsd being more popular than macosx is laughable (not that i’m happy about that).